It's midnight and I can't sleep. It's one of those nights - you know, the nights where you're tired and all you want to do is drift off into the bliss of sleep, but you can't shut off your brain and all you can do is think and all you can hear are the questions in your mind:
When is our house going to sell? Where will we live if we sell our house this month? Can we rent an apartment? A house? Move in with friends? What if we have to move twice this year, or even three times? What will that do to the kids? Will they be sad to leave the only home they've known? Will I be sad? Will it be okay if I am? How can I put on a cheery face for my boys and make them think this is a grand adventure when I'm feeling pretty scared about it myself?
So here I am, doing what any decent modern American woman would do. I'm blogging in the middle of the night.
Let me fill you in on our situation. Our house is for sale. (Again.) This time we're trying to sell it "by owner." And this time our plan is to move back to Pendleton, from whence we came almost ten years ago. We're moving back there to raise our kids and to help out our parents.
That's the plan. Now let me fill you in on the timing of this plan.
...
Okay, I don't know how the timing is going to work. And that's why I can't sleep.
Here are the things that will most likely happen for us in the next six to nine months. Peter graduates from nursing school in June and gets his RN licensure shortly thereafter. If we sell our house here in Salem before he graduates, we will need to move into a rental house, an apartment, or somebody's basement until Peter finishes school. When he does finish, he'll need to land a job in Pendleton. When that happens, we'll need to move - again - to a new house in Pendleton.
But what if our house doesn't sell before Peter graduates? What if he gets done with school and gets a job in Pendleton, and it's time for us to move but we still own a lovely home here in Salem? I guess we'll leave it vacant, hire a realtor, and move into a rental in Pendleton. Then whenever our Salem house sells, we'll buy a house in Pendleton and move again.
Either way, that's two moves in the next six to nine months.
I suppose it could work out that we find someone who wants to buy our house right at the exact time when we need to move out of it. Then we'd only be moving once. Yeah, that would be ideal, wouldn't it?
But do I dare hope for that? I certainly shouldn't plan for that - I have no control over the timing.
Should I even pray for that, when all my prayers about selling our house so far have been answered by a resounding "No?"
I'm hoping that a year from now, I'll come back and read this blog post and laugh about how silly I was, worrying about how this move was all going to work out. I'll be sitting in my new house, my kids playing in their new living room, my husband at his new job, and with all that perspective on my side I'll gaze back over the previous twelve months and see that throughout it all, I was taken care of in the best possible way by the One who had it all planned out from the beginning.
